The Film Group was a Chicago commercial film production company that made television commericials and political documentaries in the late 1960s/early 1970s. This collection includes original prints and preservation elements of their political documentaries on the 1968 Democratic National Convention including AMERICAN REVOLUTION II and the educational series URBAN CRISIS AND THE NEW MILITANTS. Filmmakers associated with the Film Group include Mike Gray, William Cottle, Howard Alk, Mike Shea, and Chuck Olin.

The six films in this collection represent the early work of documentary filmmaker and Hollywood cameraman Peter Kuttner. The films include a student film made at Northwestern University, two films he made with students at Dillard University in New Orleans as part of the War on Poverty in 1965, and three kinescopes of shows he made at Chicago's public television station WTTW.

A seven part series of educational short films produced by the Film Group that, “teach by raising questions rather than by attempting to answer them.” The modules tell their story through editing rather than voice-over narration and show “real events, with real people acting spontaneously,” as the Film Group explained to an educational film distributor. Five of the seven films in the "Urban Crisis and the New Militants" series utilize footage from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, while the other two (Cicero March and Black Moderates, Black Militants) are concerned with similar issues of civil rights and civil disobedience, but were not filmed during the Democratic Convention.